{ Category Archives } General Software Development

A few months ago, some coworkers sent around a Ruby challenge. It appears simple, but we can sometimes learn a lot from simple problems.
Write a Ruby program that determines the smallest three digit number such that when said number is divided by the sum of its digits the answer is 20.
In case that’s not clear, [...]

There is a function I need. I know how to write it, but I don’t know if it has a standard name (like map, fold, etc.). It takes one argument — a list of something — and returns a list of 2-tuples of equal length. Each tuple contains one item from the list and the [...]

That’s the title of my presentation at Dog Food Conference 2014, 29-30 September, in Columbus, Ohio. If you found my post on "Test-Only Development" with the Z3 Theorem Prover was interesting, then you’ll love this.
What if simply writing "unit tests" was enough to produce a program which makes them pass? What if your compiler could [...]

This is the fifth post of my notes from Emerging Languages Camp last year. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to read the Introduction to this series.
Axiomatic Language
Walter Wilson
Homepage · Slides · Presentation
One of the ways that you can describe a coding style is declarative versus imperative. That is, focusing on the desired result versus [...]

This is the third post of my notes from Emerging Languages Camp last year. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to read the Introduction to this series.
Noether: Symmetry in Programming Language Design
Daira Hopwood
Slides · Presentation
I found this presentation to be at once fascinating and frustrating. It was the single best talk at [...]

In this exciting installment of my notes from Emerging Languages Camp last year, some information about the Daimio and Babel programming languages. If you haven’t seen it already, you might want to read the Introduction to this series.
Daimio: A Language for Sharing
Dann Toliver
Homepage · Presentation · Slides
Daimio Is a domain-specific language for customization of web [...]

Emerging Languages Camp is an all day event held before Strange Loop. There were 11 presentations on new and unusual programming languages in varying stages of development.
Production-ready languages like C#, Ruby, Clojure, and Haskell don’t just spring to life out of nothing. There exists a historical context of major language families (Algol, LISP, ML, etc.) as [...]

Cloud Security, For Real This Time: Homomorphic Encryption and the Future of Data Privacy. That’s the title of my presentation at the next Central Ohio OWASP Quarterly Seminar, on 27 February at 1:00 p.m. Dan King, from Microsoft, will be talking about single sign-on for federated Dynamics CRM, very practical stuff which is in real [...]

I had an interesting bug in my compiler: The parser would fail on blank lines. To a certain degree, this makes sense; the formal grammar of the language does not include blank lines. This is invalid input! On the other hand, every programming language ever invented, as far as I know, simply ignores them. That [...]